The spirit moves in the rhythm of things

“Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind.”

(page 45)

Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea. New York: Dover Publications, 1964. [Facsimile of 1906 edition]

Bought at a second-hand bookstore on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

I could be almost anyone else

“There is something else that happens during the live performance of an opera. At least, it happens to me. I become slightly unsure of my own full existence. I am all eyes and ears. There are certain moments when I can feel a beautiful loss of sharp and clear personal identity. I could almost be anyone else. This, seemingly, is what happens to other people when they take drugs.

That uncertainty, the giving of yourself over to the music on the stage and the drama and lights, has a complex emotional texture. Sometimes it goes outwards and the way of listening is sharp; it is easy to feel that life itself, during a soaring aria or a moment when a melody lifts, is at its most perfect and pure. Or just that the music is perfect and pure. To hell with life!

The other part is when I lose concentration. Then the power of the music or the singing moves inwards, and I start to let my mind wander. A few times over the years, some way of handling a new novel, or a way of ending a short story, can come here in the dark more precisely and exactly than before, prompted by the music. And then I sit up and feel guilty and go back to listening as carefully as I can.”

Colm Tóibín, Six novelists on their favourite second artform, article in The Guardian Online, Saturday April 27, 2013.

Conclusion (Library at Night)

“We have always wanted to remember more, and we will continue, I believe, to weave webs to catch words in the hope that somehow, in the sheer quantity of accumulated utterances, in a book or on a screen, there will be a sound, a phrase, a spelled-out thought that will carry the weight of an answer.

[…]

However appealing we may find the dream of a knowable universe made of paper and a meaningful cosmos made of words, a library, even one colossal in its proportions or ambitious and infinite in its scope, can never offer us a “real” world, in the sense in which the daily world of suffering and happiness is real. It offers us instead a negotiable image of that real world which (in the words of the French critic Jean Roudaut) “kindly allows us to conceive it,” as well as the possibility of experience, knowledge and memory of something intuited through a tale or guessed at through a poetic or philosophical reflection.

[…]

Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.

[…]

Therefore, I am not searching for revelation of any kind, since anything said to me is necessarily limited by what I’m capable of hearing and understanding. Not for knowledge beyond what, in some secret way, I already know. Not for illumination, to which I can’t reasonably aspire. Not for experience, since ultimately I can only become aware of what is already in me. For what, then, do I search, at the end of my library’s story?

Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps consolation.”

(pages 321-325, excerpted)

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night. 027 M27L

Borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library and read avidly, cover to cover.